Londono lietuvių katalikų bendruomenės savivaldos raida 1896–1930 m

Abstract

At the beginning of the 20th century London already head a steady Lithuanian community consisting of 1500-2000 persons. The first traces of organized community life date from 1894, when religiously conscious Lithuanians joined a Catholic Polish-Lithuanian mission. From 1896 onwards a few dozen activists formed a mutual assistance society and started to plan the establishment of a purely Lithuanian mission. On November 25, 1899 they formed a committee to found the St. Peter’s Lithuanian Mission; adapted standard statute for immigrant Catholic missions to Lithuanian needs; and began raising funds both to support the mission and to pay rent to the German Catholic church which the Lithuanians used for the mission. The committee also sought to obtain legitimation from the Westminster Archbishop for the already active Lihuanian mission and began looking for a Lithuanian priest willing to come to London. The archdiocese curia approved of the idea of a separate mission for Lithuanians and also began looking for a suitable priest. But it didn’t quite appreciate the subtleties of the Polish-Lithuanian dispute and the Lithuanian desire for not just a Lithuanian-speaking priest but one who supported the ideas of Lithuanian national separateness from Poland. Despite this tension, which included Lithuanian suspicions that the Westminster hierarchy tacitly intended to foist a Lithuanian-speaking Polonizer on the Lithuanians, the latter, on July 11, 1900, received official permission to found their mission. On January 7, 1901, the statute of St. Peter’s were approved by the curia, and Father Boleslovas Šlamas (1871–1917), a priest suggested by the Lithuanian activists, was appointed rector. The statute provided for the priest to be hired and paid an agreed-upon honorarium, with all material assets of the mission belonging not to the Westminster archdiocese but to the Lithuanian mission itself. [...]